As a future psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner (PMHNP), I am working to embrace technology. And while the national transition into developing a consistent and effective electronic framework for healthcare is messy, the future of mental health care is intertwined with technology involving almost every aspect of care.
There is a hard push for improving and effectively implementing technology in nursing. The TIGER initiative stands for Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform and was first proposed in 2004 with the goal of transforming “nursing as a profession to provide safer, higher-quality patient care through the use of IT”(Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform [TIGER], 2009). The seven pillars outlined to guide nursing technology education and competency development are management and leadership, education communication and collaboration, informatics design, information technology, policy, and culture(TIGER, 2009). The hope is that all noninformatics nurses will be able to participate on a progressive level of becoming content experts, seeing relationships among data elements, execute clinical judgment based on observed data patterns, safeguard access to quality information, and actively participate in efforts to improve information management and communication (Hebda & Calderone, 2010). This emphasis raises the bar on providing consistent education not only to nursing students of all levels, but the employed population of nurses as well (Fetter, 2009).
I predict the technology benefits most applicable to my PMHNP practice will be utilizing telemental health, implementing evidence-based practices and data mining. But I anticipate that the electronic health record (EHR) will be standard as well as personal and family health records and distance learning, education and professional development with the hope that privacy and security standards will be advanced and improved.
For my formal informatics paper I plan on exploring the use of online, counseling resources as a way to improve access to mental health care in the college setting. This fits well into the TIGER initiative as it is using technology to deliver basic information and counseling previously delivered by trained professionals under the pillar of information technology.
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